Posts Tagged ‘New York’

Friday night, the weekend is finally here, you are planning to have a good time with your friends. You meet somewhere in the town, open the door of a bar or a restaurant… And a noisy sound of music and crowd assails your ears. At this point, the only solutions to communicate with your friends are either to shout at their face, to make silly signs to mime what you cannot say, or to laugh loudly, pretending that you understood what was just said. The night is going to be long…

Here are three reasons why music should definitely not be loud in bars and restaurants of New York:

1- Bars and restaurants are made to drink and speak (sometimes loudly, depending on the degree of alcoholization of the group), not to have to endure the same annoyances than during the week. According to the New York City Environmental Protection, “Noise complaints continue to be the number one quality of life issue for New York City residents”. To report any kind of noise annoyance in your neighborhood, the 311 can be useful, even for barking dogs.

2- Sometime, music they play is really bad. Two minutes of Lady Gaga can turn out in torture if we HAVE to listen to it. Really.

3- Asking the waiters to order become very challenging.

4- Loud music cut conversation. After 30 minutes of communication attempts, people get fed up with speaking for them selves. So they shut up. And everybody look into their glass of bear, pretending to enjoy the music.

The media is having a love affair with pests. In recent weeks, sightings of opossums, raccoons and stink bugs have all been big news as local media outlets scramble to turn over every rock imaginable in their quest for the next pest. With a new king crowned every week, it’s only a matter of time before the city’s lovable black squirrel becomes public enemy number one.

But in the end, New Yorkers have it easy. Raccoons in your garbage? Roaches in the kitchen? Opossums in your parks? All mere nuisances. People elsewhere live with pests so terrible that you’ll think twice before complaining about some razor-toothed tree rat hanging around Coney Island. Think bed bugs are the worst thing since Moses introduced the locust to Egypt? Just take a look at these appalling annoyances.

Bot flies. Native to the equatorial regions of the Americas, the human bot fly reproduces in the worst possible way. A female bot fly grabs hold of flying mosquitoes and lays her eggs on the insect’s belly. When the mosquito lands on a human to feed, the larvae burrow into the skin. That’s right, this maggot actually lives in people. The maggot then feeds off the host for a period of eight weeks, causing the host to develop an open, boil-like sore. And if the thought of a maggot living under your skin wasn’t disgusting enough, this video of a bot fly larvae extraction will earn this pest a permanent spot in your nightmares.

Japanese giant hornet. Found in the mountainous regions of Japan, the Japanese giant hornet is no laughing matter. At two inches long, the hornet as big as a humming bird and it packs a sting powerful enough to kill a human being if left untreated. These hornets feed on smaller bees and can decimate an entire hive in a few hours. Their sting has been described as a “red-hot spike piercing the flesh.” The venom can dissolve human flesh and is responsible for an average 40 deaths a year, making the Japanese giant hornet more deadly than many, more venomous, snakes.

Candiru. A pencil-thin parasitic fish common to the waters of the Amazon River, the candiru lodges itself in the gills of larger fish, using spikes to stay in place, and feeds off the host’s blood. That doesn’t seem so bad, right? Well, the river can be a little murky at times, and sometimes the tiny fish mistakes a man’s urethra for the gills of a fish. It’s a story that’s so unbelievable that it’s easy to dismiss candiru attacks as the stuff of urban legends, but recent investigations have proven the myth true. As if we needed anotherreason to stay out of the water…